Fourth Form of Madness

This week due to life circumstances, I pretty much ground to a halt. All the things I have been filling my life with, yoga, teacher training, uni, teaching were suspended for the week and I found myself without something to rush to for once and it was probably just what I needed. I even worked from home and surprised myself how much one can achieve in the quietness of ones own abode without constant interruptions.

I am a big one for home practice, but somehow this week I just felt that the mat was a no-go zone. Yoga is a gift and it’s ability to de-stress and increase one’s ability to handle life just as it comes is phenomenal but something within me wanted to test that I wasn’t also using it as a prop to hold myself up with and to hide behind. Oh how I missed it as I wandered around the house looking longingly at my practice space.

And then it happened. I popped some music on and started to hum a few bars. Soon I was trawling through all my old cps, putting on Dylan, The Waifs, Everything but the Girl and John Lennon and warbling along so loud that the neighbours probably wished they brought a house in Bunbury. It felt good, I felt connected and I felt a love that………………..suddenly I realised, I feel like this when I practice yoga.

Long before yoga, I used to sing. In the shower, at home, actually pretty much all the time. It was the time I felt most like me, contained in myself and free, if that makes sense. To sing is to vibrate as the sound you produces goes outwards but also very much turns inwards, so there becomes no difference between the outside and inside. I had forgotten this gift, this simple yet very effective gift that is equally there for us all. I gave thanks, as with everything that is going on in my life lately I felt I had stepped away from my centre a fair bit. I felt like I had taken “one giant step” back towards centre by rediscovering a part of myself that I had silenced through neglect.

As I continued to flick through my cd stash I acknowledged that all that throat chakra work must finally be kicking in 🙂 I also chuckled to myself as up to now I had seen yoga and singing as separate activities even though I have participated in kirtan many times and have hundreds of cds of various artists, it never occurred to me how joined they are, both with similar purposes and outcomes. Once very earlier on in my yoga journey, a teacher told me that “music has no place in yoga”, without even thinking and finding the courage from somewhere I automatically said back “There is always room for music in yoga, it is part of life’s soul’. I said those words like an involuntary reaction, without really understanding their meaning. Now I really understand those words and hell, I’m going sing about it……….. 🙂